This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Canada Wonderland's new roller coaster, Leviathan, is the tallest and fastest in Canada. The Vaughan ride is a thrill-seeker&rsquo;s dream.

Canada's Wonderland, in partnership with SickKids, held an auction for the first rides on the Leviathan, seen here, one of the biggest and tallest rollercoasters in the world. The amusement park auctioned off seats on the first three trains to the highest bidders, who became the first official riders on the Park's newest thrill machine on Friday. In total, 96 seats were available for bidding to philanthropists and coaster enthusiasts alike for bidding. (TORONTO STAR STAFF / RENE JOHNSTON)

Canada's Wonderland gave media a firsthand feel for their newest and tallest roller coaster, the Leviathan. Video by Bernard Weil.

By Paul HunterFeature Writer

Fri., April 27, 2012

Jordan May has twisted dreams. Some are completely loopy. Others are gut-churning.

The 15-year-old aspires to design roller coasters. The goal consumes him. He has spent hours doodling fanciful tracks and conjuring up imaginary thrills. He rides coasters so often he says his friends think him “an alien.”

That passion has brought him here. No, wait, he’s over there. Hold on, what’s he doing way up there?

May is at Canada’s Wonderland and, at the moment, land has nothing to do with it. The Grade 10 student from Brampton’s Heart Lake Secondary School is hurtling though the maiden voyage of Leviathan, Wonderland’s $28-million contribution to the world of scream machines and summer rites of passage.

May bid $260 so that on Friday he could be among the first to plunge 93.3 metres on the ride’s initial drop at an angle of 80 degrees while reaching speeds of 148 km/h. It’s something akin to free-falling off the roof of the Four Seasons Hotel in Yorkville. Oh, and at some point, his body will be subjected to G-forces of 4.5. Space shuttle astronauts experience 3Gs during takeoff.

One G is the force of Earth’s gravity and one G — $1,000 — is what it took for the top bidder to have his pick of seats among the 96 available on the first ride. The minimum successful bid was $256. All the money, $41,000, went to Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children.

“Wow, it was absolutely worth it,” says May after making his way back to terra firma. “I’m very impressed with it. It’s absolutely amazing. It’s smooth, it’s fast. It’s got the drop. It’s aggressive but not at all painful or unpleasant. And it’s thrilling. I love it.”

Leviathan’s spin cycle officially lasts three minutes and 28 seconds, but the part with the real speed and thrills is just over a minute.

“A lot of people are saying that it’s short — the time — but the track length is still very, very long,” says May, says May, who particularly liked an unexpected speed bump before the first camelback. “It just goes fast.”

Leviathan is now the tallest and fastest roller coaster in Canada. Behemoth, at the same Vaughan park north of Toronto, topped out at 70 metres and 123 km/h. Leviathan is the third tallest traditional lift-style coaster in the world, behind a 96.6-metre monster in Japan and a 94.2-metre tummy turner in Sandusky, Ohio.

Leviathan’s 1,672 metres of blue painted steel, like ribbons in the sky, either entrance or horrify at first sight. There’s nothing subtle about it.

“Leviathan is major, major league,” says Paul Ruben, the North American editor of Park World, a monthly trade publication focusing on amusement parks. “It is truly a world-class ride

“This will draw thrill-seekers from around North America, with some probably coming in from Europe,” says the 75-year-old, who was on hand for Friday’s unveiling. “Thrill-seekers love this. Anything faster, higher, stronger, they want to do it.”

Leviathan, named for a Biblical sea monster, was designed and manufactured by the Swiss firm Bolliger & Mabillard, which also built Behemoth for the 2008 season.

“They’re generally considered to be the Rolls Royce of roller coasters,” says Robert Coker, the author of Roller Coasters: A Thrill Seeker’s Guide to the Ultimate Scream Machines.

“Not everybody loves them because some find them to be a little too refined — there’s not a rough edge anywhere. They’re always going to be super smooth.”

Norm Pirtovshek, Wonderland’s general manager, said the park needed a new attraction to help spread out the visitors.

“Everyone is saying, ‘the wait in line is too long, the wait in line is too long.’ Well, we thought lets add one more big ride, balance out the park and…we said, let’s go one step further, let’s get into the top five, six roller coasters in the world and this is in that category now,” he said.

Park World editor Ruben, who has ridden 807 different coasters, believes Leviathan is part of a “roller coaster renaissance,” as amusement parks lure patrons by taking them to dizzying new heights.

There are about 20 to 40 new coaster rides introduced globally each year, he says, a growth rate “accelerated by a roller coaster arms race. Every park wants to distinguish itself by building the biggest, fastest, wildest new ride.”

As for Leviathan, says Ruben, it’s “the biggest one opening in the world this year.”

In many ways,
we’re going back to our past, to the heyday of coasters in the 1920s, when there were about 3,000 worldwide and about 1,500 in North America. But various factors, such as the Depression limiting discretionary income, World War II using up building materials, and the arrival of television, all eroded the numbers.

A growing population and growing wealth meant the land under those man-made fun zones had more value when covered in suburban housing developments or shopping malls.

In Toronto, both Sunnyside Amusement Park in the west end and Scarboro Beach Amusement Park in the east had popular roller coasters. Sunnyside was bulldozed for the Gardiner Expressway, while Scarboro became a housing development.

The number of coasters dipped, to use an industry-appropriate term, to about 300 globally and 145 in North America by 1973.

But the success of Disneyland, the family-friendly California park opened by Walt Disney in 1955, showed the economic potential of a one-stop theme park. So did the Six Flags over Texas theme park, a field of screams that opened in 1961. So while older carnivals, seen by some as seedy, were dying, the new style Disney-like parks became the rage.

Today there are 2,854 roller coasters worldwide, with 747 in North America and 54 in Canada. There are 16 at Wonderland, including Leviathan. That total means our local park has the third most on the continent.

So, why are people willing to pay money and, sometimes, line up for hours for a thrill ride that can last less than a minute and scare the shriek out of you?

“It’s the closest thing to being in heaven,” says Mike Romiscon, the Canadian region rep of America Coaster Enthusiasts, a non-profit organization devoted to the preservation and enjoyment of coasters.

Romiscon tosses out concepts about conquering fears and overcoming challenges but, truthfully, it just comes down to one thing.

“Air time,” he says. “That feeling when you’re out of your seat, almost weightless. That’s what makes a coaster great.

That thrill from being terrified while remaining safe, the sense of losing control and the adrenalin rush of feeling danger when there really is none, is what allows coasters to maintain their appeal.

“On Leviathan, you’re going to drop from a height of 306 feet,” says Ruben. “You would never do that in real life. You wouldn’t jump out of a 30-storey window. It wouldn’t be safe.

“Here you get the same effect. You’re going to be weightless for several seconds and you’re going to survive.”

That rush of adrenalin brought on by fear may actually be good for some people, says Dr. Greg Dubord, who teaches in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto.

“You’re so focused on the here and now in that high-adrenalin state that if you’ve got something (troubling) on your mind, it’s just gone. It’s a way of clearing things out.”

Dubord says his wife talked him onto a roller coaster a few years back and he hated the experience. He prefers to get that type of rush through skiing, sea kayaking or stand-up paddling.

“It scared the crap out me,” he says of his ride on the Expedition Everest roller coaster at Disney World. “I was not able to label the physiology I was experiencing as pleasant. It was intense, but the label that got added was bad — intensely bad.”

Still, he says he understands those who seek out thrill rides.

In addition to an increased heart rate, change in breathing patterns, tightened muscles and blood rushing to the skin, he said blood tends to leave the thinking part of the brain.

“In a sense, it’s like a control/alt/delete for the cortex,” he says of the mental reset a roller coaster might provide some people.

While roller coasters might give riders the sense that they are in danger, they are remarkably safe.

Ruben says that, according to statistics he has obtained from the insurance industry, on average 1.5 people die while riding roller coasters each year around the world. In the U.S, alone, he estimates there are six million coaster rides each year. When a rider does perish, it is almost always the result of horseplay, such as when someone frees themselves from the restraints and rides on the back of a car.

“You are 100 times safer riding a roller coaster than you are driving to the amusement part,” he says.

Roller coasters are surprisingly simple devices that, other than computerized monitoring that keep trains from colliding, have changed little since 1884, when the 6-mile-per-hour Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway was built in the U.S. at Coney Island, N.Y. It’s still about gravity. While some riders assume the trains are powered in some way, the trip is all based on momentum and the energy gained from the initial drop. Three sets of wheels, above, below and beside the track ensure that the trains don’t leave the rails.

At Ryerson University, associate professor Kathryn Woodcock specializes in researching and teaching about human factors in engineering and ergonomics. She has a particular interest in amusement park rides and oversees the school’s Tools for Holistic Ride Inspection Learning and Leadership (THRILL) Laboratory.

She notes in an email that amusement rides, including restraint devices and G-forces, are strictly regulated and monitored in Ontario, with ride operators and regulators working in tandem, and “as a result, properly registered amusement rides in Ontario are very safe.”

The “fright” of a roller coaster, she continues, is achieved though the incorporation of “sensory illusions to make you feel more precarious than you are. This includes optical illusions and sensory surprises like sudden changes of direction or sensations or near weightlessness to enhance your thrill experience.”

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com